Tag Archives: children

Introduction

As I was growing up in Cleveland in the 1960’s, high social mobility in America was a given. “Anyone can be president, even you,” our teachers told us as an indicator that we all had equal opportunities to succeed. This was part of the American way.

Recent essays I’ve been reading indicate that this is no longer so true. The wealth disparity has widened, which doesn’t bother me much, but the opportunity to move from poor to rich seems to be shrinking. This bothers me a lot. It means that the prosperity tide is not rising as fast as it should, which means all us Americans are suffering.

With this revelation, the issue of social mobility moves up to “important” on my list of things to pay attention to. It is also looks like one that can be corrected if we pay more community attention to it.

It can be corrected, but the solution will be a dramatic change in the social boundary of who gets involved in child raising and education. The new boundary will include a lot more time being spent by both children and parents in neighborhood-level educating activities — a neighborhood-oriented institution of some sort is going to become the new extended family for children and their raisers.

Inspiration

This essay was inspired by a 9 Feb 13 Economist article, Social mobility in America: Repairing the rungs on the ladder, and a related Economist Free Exchange article, Nomencracy. Both of these talk about measuring social mobility (a difficult task) and how it seems to have declined in America over the last two decades.

From the social mobility article:

“America is particularly exposed to the virtuous-meritocracy paradox because its poor are getting married in ever smaller numbers, leaving more children with single mothers short of time and money. One study suggests that the gap in test scores between the children of America’s richest 10% and its poorest has risen by 30-40% over the past 25 years.
American conservatives say the answer lies in boosting marriage; the left focuses on redistribution. This newspaper would sweep away tax breaks such as mortgage-interest deduction that help richer people, and target more state spending on the poor. But the main focus should be education policy.”

Surprise from the Seventies

As the Sexual Revolution of the 1970’s unfolded one of the warnings by conservative groups was that children would suffer. It would seem that this warning has come true, and along with children the community has suffered in a surprising way: less social mobility.

The contemporary conservative reaction has been, “I told you so. Now let’s go back to the good old ways. All you single moms: Get married!” This isn’t likely to happen. It’s also not likely that prosperous married families are going to strive for anything less than the best for their kids, so schemes to distribute wealth through taxing the rich and entitling the poor aren’t going to help this problem, either.

This means that if we want to be:
o improving social mobility
o making things more socially equal
o making America a better place for all

We need to be looking for new ways of handling child raising and educating — particularly for single parents because they are a large and growing class of child raisers.

Social Mobility, Education and Prosperity

This is an important issue because the whole community prospers as new and better ways of doing things are discovered and implemented. It’s not obvious and not talked about much, but prosperity at the top is limited by prosperity at the bottom. An example of this is that the pharaohs families in Ancient Egypt were at the top of their prosperity chain, but they still had to eat food in season and they still suffered from deadly infectious diseases. In many ways they did not have life as good as even a poor American of today.

This is an example of how important discovering new ways of doing things is to the prosperity of the whole community — top and bottom. This means, as the universal education enthusiasts of the 1800’s espoused, that good education for everyone in the community brings prosperity to everyone in the community.

In America in the 2010’s we are dropping the ball on this pillar. We need to recognize this and we need to be doing things differently. A vivid example of how much the ball has been dropped was the huge quantity of jaw-dropping dumbness spouted during the 2012 election campaign, on all sides and in the media. In 2012 Governor Bobby Jindal complained about Republicans becoming the party of stupid, but I see the bigger concern being America becoming the nation of stupid.

This is important, and in this day and age of lots of single parenting, child raising must be examined as much as child educating. We as a community need to be paying as much attention to child raising systems as we do to formal education systems… and both need a lot of attention.

What follows are some speculations I have on new child raising and educating systems. The goal of these is to have all the community better educated so we can all make better choices about how to run our communities and all have even more prosperity than we do today.

Child Raising Possibilities

The Matriarchy Neighborhood Approach

One possibility for a new child raising style is to deliberately encourage neighborly matriarchy — encourage a group of women in a neighborhood to share child raising activities with all the other women and children of the neighborhood. The neighborhood becomes a sea of children mixed with a sea of child raisers, all pretty much equally accessible. This has the advantage of harmonizing with the old Neolithic Village way of doing things, so it is harmonizing with instinctive thinking.

One big obstacle to this style is the contemporary deep fear of child abusers, kidnappers and predators. Another is Us versus Them thinking about neighbors. But there’s a lot of instinct supporting this matriarchy style, so this contemporary moral panic may be overcomeable.

Overcoming the fears will happen when there is a reliable program that child raisers can become part of, and becoming part of the program becomes expected.

The State-provided Child Care Approach

Getting children raised better is a community issue: Better raised children create a better community in the next decade. Just as the community currently provides schools, the community can provide day care and other child care options. I envision neighborhood playgrounds with standard supervision of some nature so latchkey kids can… no… are expected to go to the playground instead of sitting on a couch with a TV or video game. And more, there can be neighborhood field trips organized so that all the kids get to experience each other and the diverse world around them. The best way to handle this may be declaring some minimum child raising standards and a voucher system to pay for what is required.

And not just the kids, the parents should be expected to attend some of these activities on a regular basis. This is how they will get to know each other and how they will get to know what their kids are learning. Participating in these activities will come to be considered part of good parenting.

Developing new good advice

The heart of this improving battle is changing thinking and habits, so part of what will be needed is new good advice to be passed around the community. An example would be something like this for a truism: “For every hour you spend on self-indulgence spend an hour on improving you or your children.” This meaning that if you spend time at the beauty parlor or spa, plan on spending equal time on at the playground, on homework, or on a field trip — things that will improve the minds of you and your children.

Educating Possibilities

As the Industrial Revolution kicked in during the 1800’s, it became clear that educating everyone in the community was a big advantage. This understanding was the foundation for universal education concept we live with today. This is why we have public schools and laws saying everyone must be educated.

This benefit hasn’t changed. It has gotten more so. (Note: It will get less so when The Singularity happens and computers take over most of the manufacturing and service jobs, but we aren’t there yet.)

For this reason it is important that our education system reflect the harsh reality that a lot of children working through the system come from poor, single parent environments. Since this is new, it means doing a lot of experimenting to figure out what will work well in this new harsh reality. Sadly, the current American public education system is heavily “encrusted” with traditions and work rules that worked well when the nuclear family predominated. This encrusted environment must be scrapped and replaced with one open to experimenting and innovating. This is the way we will see big progress in better educating all our children.

The goal of these new systems should be to widen the number of people involved in raising a child. Over time in the US we have gone from the extended family to the nuclear family to the single parent. This shaving off of people involved in raising a child should be reversed. There should be lots of people involved again.

And, again, this new school environment and this new child care environment need to feed back on each other. They should pay attention to each other.

How Much State Involvement? How much Busybody Involvement?

Who should decide when a parent is doing it right or doing it wrong?

With local school boards and state Child Protective Services agencies (CPS) we have a lot of government involvement in these processes already. We also have lots of locally-given advice and lots of media bandwidth. In sum, there are dozens of places a child rearer can turn to for advice, and many of those will provide forceful advice that must be followed whether the parent wants to, or not.

This is not surprising. In the Neolithic Village environment most first time mothers were in their teens and Bride Thinkers (my term). They were young and inexperienced, so advice and support helped not only the young mother but the community as well. This means giving advice to first time mothers is supported by powerful instinct. What has changed dramatically since Neolithic times is the family relations surrounding that mother — in those days the advice was accompanied by a lot of family support as well as advice.

What we now need to do is recognize that any forceful advice being given must be matched with forceful resource being provided. The community must put up money and warm bodies as well as mouth in dealing with this issue. We need to update the advice and support given single mothers. Again, we need to recognize that the better these children are raised, the better the whole community will function when these kids grow up. Our communities will support less “crazy” if the members are well educated.

This universal education pillar must be recognized as important again, and sincere attention paid to it, and it must be extended to include child raising as well as child educating.

I was at a grandchild’s baptism. This was a group of about forty people assembled in a room for about a half hour. The group consisted of grandparents, parents, children, toddlers and babes in arms — a full mix of age groups.

The kids were doing kids things thoroughly mixed in with adults doing the baptism ceremony. No one thought twice about this wide range of activities taking place. Example: One of the kids wanted to sit next to daddy while he was giving a speech. She moved her chair next to his at the front of the room, and fidgeted in it while he spoke. No one minded. When the child got out of the chair to move on to something else interesting, the mother quietly moved it back. But that’s not what the child wanted and she quickly moved it back next to daddy.

Again, this mix of activities did not spoil the baptism one wit. It was tolerated, and everyone had a good time.

I bring this up as an example of the benefit of tolerance. It was impressive!

Here are some analogies to other worldly situations:

o Each person there experienced the baptism in their own way. There wasn’t just one right way, there were many right ways.

o The kids didn’t experience the baptism the same way the adults did, but they knew enough to not be running, shouting and screaming. Many of the older kids busied themselves with watching over the younger kids, and the younger kids busied themselves with exploring and quiet take-up games. The young kids would punctuate their games with coming and sitting next to a parent or older child for a while, getting hugs and whispers, then back to exploring.

o When the big moment came, all the kids rushed to the front to be up front and close when the magic moment happened. They knew why they were there, and this part was of great interest to them.

o The girl moving her chair is an example of disruptive technology. She was innovating. She had come up with a good idea. When mom thought the chair move was just random, the child demonstrated that, no, she had thought this through and her idea would work better.

And, again, the encouraging part was that all this tolerance made this ritual more enjoyable for all involved, and built enfranchisement. The kids were not herded off to experience this in a separate place. The adults did not have to put up with military precision. Each person played their part in their way.

Once again, a wonderful example of tolerance in action, and how tolerance can both increase life’s enjoyability and build community enfranchisement.

In Child Champs I took on the challenge of writing an interesting story about living one hundred years from now. This was a big challenge because I see humanity as “winning” — this will not be some sort of post-apocalypse world. It will be a rich world, and rich worlds are complex, which makes them a lot harder to write about than the “life is cheap, barbarians are everywhere” story background which has been much more common for stories about the future for decades. When I was growing up it was post-nuclear war apocalypse, now it’s a post-climate change or post-resource exhaustion apocalypse. Child Champs is much more in the style of Fred Pohl in the Heechee series and Isaac Asimov in the Foundation and I Robot series. These, too, are rich world scenarios.

The foundation premises in Child Champs are:

o that human population will peak in the 2050’s then decline slowly. This will happen because humanity will become 90% urban, and prosperous city folk don’t have as many kids as poor country folk.

o that productivity — efficiency in making and using stuff — is going to continue its steady increase. This is important because it means we won’t run out of resources. In our future, as is true now, efficiency and effectiveness are the ultimate “green” — they do a lot more to save our planet than windmills and recycling bins.

o that our lives will have a lot more computer, nanotechnology and bioengineering mixed in — there’s not only an app for that, there’s a gene and a nanodevice as well.

In sum, this is a rich world, a very rich world, and a very probable one.

Then I put my thinking cap on: Given these premises as a starting point, what’s living in this world going to be like? What are humans going to be doing?

As I say as part of my Technofiction introduction on White World, “Technology is the variable. Human thinking is the constant.” The humans inhabiting this rich world are going to be thinking very much like people do today. They are going to have hopes and fears, they are going to have ambitions and frustrations, they are going to take much in their world for granted. (“Driverless cars… Of course, why do you ask about those?”) But the tools available for expressing those very human emotions are going to be different, so the people of that future world will act differently and think about different things.

One thing that will remain near and dear to the heart, and be considered very important, will be having and raising children. That’s why I picked it as theme for this story.